Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 24 and 25 October 2014 The Leverhulme-funded Planned Violence Network’s third workshop, ‘Planning Modernity: Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Discontinuities’, could not have taken place in a more apt location. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)…

Elleke Boehmer, Dominic Davies, Alex Tickell Milton Keynes—or ‘MK’, as it is identified by scrawls of urban graffiti—is the UK’s most self-consciously constructed, vivid and extensive large-scale urban planning project. The city is built around…

The second Planned Violence workshop that will take place at JNU in Delhi on 24-25 October 2014 will foreground, among other topics, some of the questions, challenges and spatial predicaments with which cities of both…

King’s College London, 30th/31st January 2014 Workshop Summary Under the heading “Empire and Post-Empire in the Global City”, the first Planned Violence workshop, hosted at King’s College London on 30th and 31st January 2014, addressed…

Alex Tickell, a member of the Planned Violence Working Group, Lecturer in English at the Open University and director of the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group, offers a thought on Rana Dasgupta’s new book-length study of…

In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship between Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material culture of the modern state known colloquially as “public utilities”…

The Fall 2015 issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies will be a special issue on the topic “Infrastructuralism”, aiming to tackle questions of infrastructure in literature. The guest editors, Sophie Beal, Bruce Robbins and Michael Rubenstein,…

When Mark Gevisser was a little boy, growing up in a apartheid South Africa, he was obsessed with maps, and with the Holmden’s Registry, Johannesburg’s Street Guide, in particular. He played a game called “Dispatcher”…

About the network

The Leverhulme-funded network, ‘Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature’, sets out to explore the shifting relationship between urban planning, violence and literary representation from colonial into postcolonial times. The network is based in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford.